The fact is that a large proportion of the populace, even those who regularly use elementary arithmetic in their daily lives, regard it as a form of magic of which the object is solely to perform an incantation according to the traditional ritual as inherited from ones forefathers [in the course of which it will doubtless have been subjected to numerous accidental modifications]. Reason is helpless in the face of such forces. Traditional systems of currency, such as the former British pounds, shillings, pence, farthings, recognised that most people become confused by scale factors in excess of ten or so, assigning distinguishable denomination names to ameliorate the problem. For some bizarre reason the inventors of the decimal system retained cents alongside dollars (or whatever), sowing the seed for the kind of confusion related in the Verizon anecdote: if you're going to use decimal points, for crying out loud don't then go and muddy the water with redundant denominations! A related factor is that mathematically untrained operatives, lacking the requisite logical facility, are obliged to fall back on tentative pattern recognition --- this feature is very plain in the conversation recorded. Even specialists who might be expected to know better are not immune to this weakness: audio engineers regularly refer to "signal-to-noise ratio S/N", which they then proceed to calculate by dividing the signal power _into_ the noise! Fred Lunnon